“The philosophical debates of the 1920s and early ‘30s around the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics in Soviet Russia exhibit a certain entanglement of both scientific and political registers”
“Two figures represent this: Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent Bolshevik ideologue, experimental scientist, associate (and adversary) of Lenin; and Boris Hessen, a physicist who struggled for the revolution in the Red Army during the Civil War, architect of the new physics program at the Moscow State University during 1932-1936, when he was a dean of Physics Department”
“Each of them was a thinker who pioneered anew methodological and ontological paradigm that integrated the social and scientific revolutions”
“Both offered philosophical interpretations of the theory of relativity:”
“Bogdanov’s “The Principle of Relativity from an Organizational Perspective””
“Hessen’s Basic Concepts of the Theory of Relativity”
“A few words about the philosophical landscape of the first post-revolutionary decade:”
“Proponents of religious philosophy and neo-Kantians had left the country (the “Philosophers’ Steamship”) or lost their public platform.”
“What remained of the Imperial-era philosophical trends were the previously marginal narodniks with their second-phase positivism background (the empirio-criticism of Ernst Mach) and an interest for the sociology of scientific knowledge”
“the Hegelians, perpetually persecuted in the Tsarist days for their revolutionary stance, and presently allied with the Marxists”
“Both movements were highly politicized, possessed of a keen sense for the emerging opportunity to forge a new model of society, its social and political organization, and its evolving worldview”
“The awareness of radical transformation and a dawning of a new historical era made new demands on philosophy: it was no longer a matter of substantiate reality and formal verification of knowledge, but of an analysis of paradigm shifts, a revision of basic concepts and new practices—i.e., a dialectics in the Hegelian and Marxist sense”
“The framework for these radical approaches was outlined by Lenin in his acclaimed book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism”
“Somewhat arbitrarily, he divides the new philosophical landscape into Idealism (epistomology) and Materialism (ontology), Mach(-ism) and Marxism, largely along the lines of political divisions among revolutionaries”
“The Mach(-ists) developed a radical form of epistemology grounded in the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, whereas the Marxists interpreted revolutionary historical transformations as an historical process of social and economic transformations”
“Working to stave off the dominance of the epistemological school, Lenin championed materialism, construed as a matter of political decision. In this way, he brought politics into ontology, bridged the gap between epistemology and ontology, and reframed material reality as process-based and constructive rather than passive and stable, as it was thought to be before him”
“the experience of wars and revolutions had exposed the unstable nature of reality and its correlation with political decisions and actions”
“Reflexive “pure conscience” could no longer claim a position outside the world, finding itself deeply embroiled in the materiality of social and political reality”
“The philosopher A. Goltsman argued that the theory of relativity hewed much closer to the theory of dialectical materialism than the conservative ideas of “Papist scientists and Black-Hundred reactionaries,” adding:
The Idealist muddle of ideas about space is thoroughly eradicated by Einstein’s theory of relativity”
“The physicist Arkadiy Timiryazev, on the other hand, pronounced the theory of relativity to be a form of Idealism”
“In his paper “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Mach(-ism),” Timiryazev sets himself the task of “demonstrating that in constructing his edifice Einstein made use of a very specific epistemology, one that differs but little from that of Mach”5—a contention that in his view suffices to sink the whole theory”
“But it was not enough for the ontological (materialist) point of view. A response to Timiryazev, penned by the physicist Abram Ioffe, was printed in Pravda:
Some of our thinkers like to discuss the theory of relativity in the context of the Materialist-Idealist divide. It would seem readily apparent that a theory that describes material phenomena and the physical processes of matter cannot be opposed to a materialist worldview, provided its aim is to give an accurate account of the properties of matter”
“The main conflict centered around the proposition that “with every epoch-making discovery, materialism must alter its form,” assuming revolution as the one epoch-making discovery”
“Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928): scientist and theoretician; one of the founders of the Bolshevik party alongside Lenin; key figure in the revolutionary uprising of 1905; writer of science fiction; and Lenin’s adversary in the debate around the conceptual framework for the development of Marxist philosophy”
“Bogdanov believed that a new Marxism must assimilate second-phase positivism, i.e., broaden its approach by appropriating the logic of revolutions in scientific knowledge into its political-economic and social philosophy”
“He also developed a theory of organization, an early version of the theory of systems, and was the architect of the Proletkult movement and its networked social structure”
“Bogdanov and his allies acknowledged that Einstein’s epistemological principles coincided with those of Mach, but they argued that Marxism shared the very same principles—with the proviso that knowledge cannot be divorced from the lived circumstances of the subject and that proletarian culture and science in the new socio-political reality must pursue a new conception of time and space, one that rejected determinism and linearity of processes”
“That meant interpreting “fact” as “multiplicity of fact,” and deriving the epistemic positions from the circumstances of the subjects”
“Objectivity is not an inherently given state of the world, but rather a reconciliation of differences”
“Old physics had posited an abstract subject, and so the question of reconciliation never came up. But if we acknowledge that difference is objective then we are left with either a world that is perpetually in flux or diverging systems of understanding and perception in need of a “reconciling transformation.””
“Thus the new ontological problem is not one of truth as abstraction, but of complementarity of experience. The latter is always a real position, where localities are valid only when taken together; otherwise they are said to exhibit “an anti-scientific narrowness of systemic patriotism.””
“In Bogdanov’s theory, space-time meshes are necessary instrumentally, because they set boundaries for hyperplastic epistemic and social systems. He offers an example from everyday life to demonstrate that the relativity of spatiotemporal meshes is rooted in everyday pre-scientific experience: a train engineer driving his train across the terrain gauges his motion not from absolute space, but from within his cabin. And if he drops something on the floor, he shifts to a different spatiotemporal measurement and simply picks the object up from the floor without taking into account the movement of the train”
“The theory of relativity retains the principle of relativity but gets rid of subjectivism and idealism by insisting that conceptions of matter are inevitably revised with the discovery of new organizational forms”
“Bogdanov’s ideas came close to the yet-unformulated principle of complementarity, later articulated by Niels Bohr, which posits the significance of measurement in the formation of reality”
“Bogdanov saw universalism as a pernicious philosophical trend that in the political arena manifested itself as bureaucracy in management and tyranny in government”
“Boris Hessen (1893-1936): studied physics at the University of Edinburgh (as a Jew, he was unable to enroll in any of the universities of the Russian Empire) and later at Petrograd University; took part in the Civil War; joined the philosophy department at the Institute of Red Professors, chaired by Abram Deborin, where his research focused on the philosophy of physics; served as the dean of the physics department at Moscow State University, and as the director of the Institute of Physics for a three-year term; was arrested and executed”
“His aim was to come up with an interpretation of the theory of relativity within the framework of the logic of dialectical materialism, which was being developed by Deborin’s group”
“His contribution to the journal discussions around the theory of relativity came in the form of an article co-authored with Vasiliy Yegorshin and framed as a rebuttal of the reactionary position”
“As a dialectical materialist, Hessen saw interpretations of physical nature as constructs of the complex causalities of political-economic interests, social systems, scientific theories, and material needs of distinct historical periods”
“He demonstrated that the conception of matter that emerged in the Modern Era had been shaped by the politico-economic needs of the mining and smelting industries and trade logistics”
“These demanded specific mathematical calculations and the extraction of concrete entities from the vague metaphysical concept of nature: rock formations, mines, travel distances, and, ultimately, an articulation of theoretical mechanics and the formulation of a “mechanistic picture of the world” that saw nature as an external, passive, and stable resource and the earth as solid rock (rather than farmland, forest, ecological whole.)”
“By demonstrating the link between classical physics and capitalist political economy, Hessen demolished the classical conception of matter and seemed to paint his opponents as would-be advocates of “exploitative capitalism.””
“Is the indeterminacy of quantum theory an epistemological or an ontological problem? Does quantum indeterminacy presuppose contingency of matter or is it merely the impossibility of ultimate knowledge?”
“In Hessen’s view, the development of physics in the modern era was based on the mechanics of discrete bodies, and the ensuing definitions of matter, motion, time, and space, as well as the mathematical models of their measurements and the definite relations between bodies are grounded in this paradigm”
“With the arrival of molecular-kinetic theory, the existing procedures were no longer capable of describing the new aggregate objects. Statistical methods were seen as the answer, but these regarded aggregates as unities, i.e., they were adapted to the logic of discrete bodies that did not take into account their interactions with time and space. Matter was construed as a given, i.e., ahistorically”
“Quantum mechanics deals with aggregate objects of a different kind”
“Hessen applied statistical theory to the problems of experimental physics in an attempt to reinterpret the concept of the physical object, which was crumbling in light of the new discoveries of quantum physics: the atom is broken down into nucleus and electrons, while the latter, seemingly indivisible, would within a decade be further subdivided into quarks”
“Under the old paradigm, one could average the measurements and use statistical averaging to construct an object. But using averages meant discarding significant data points”
“Hessen’s approach to quantum mechanics has to do with not only the theory of statistical systems but also the theoretical field of Marxist radical-democratic political sociology”
“The complication of causality and the increase in the number of actors must alter the type of rationality, it demands a different construction of the object and its now-included observer-human”
“Hessen the materialist also turns out to be a radical constructivist. Such a constructivism may be understood through the avant-garde practices exemplified by the art of the constructivists and productivists, the cultural politics of the Proletkult, and the conceptions of the new man”
“In many instances, these practices extended far beyond the purview of aesthetic ideas with intention to “life-building.””
“Hessen’s constructivism is grounded in the logic of quantum mechanics or, in contemporary terminology, in the ontological contingency as a revolutionary event”
“Given the right objectives, instruments, and social circumstances, we can participate in the production of one kind of materiality or another”
“And that is what Boris Hessen, the dialectician, sought to demonstrate, having gone through the experience of the revolution and of the founding of class-blind educational and research institutions”
“In other words, what interested him in the philosophy of physics was not the accuracy of calculations, the formalism of quantum mechanics, or the inner logic of scientific progress; rather, it was the question of how initial assumptions (and, subsequently, logics) may be revised and to what extent they are dependent on the theoretical practices of the moment”
“The path traveled by Bogdanov and Hessen in their interpretation of the new physics is not the path of “shut up and calculate,” not a physicist’s attempt to use the perspective of classical epistemology to show “how things really are.” Drawn into the political and cultural transformations, they could not help seeing the complexity of the whole process: “the world could be otherwise.””
“The variability of reality is not fantasy or subjectivism, but causal complexity, which re-creates the objectivity of matter, including politics, culture, and economics”
“This approach became relevant once more toward the end of the 20th century with the “scientific wars” of the social constructivists, the sociology of knowledge and the scientific realists, with feminist epistemology and decolonial theory, and in the 21st century in the philosophy of neo-materialism and speculative realism”