Most of the philosophy in this catalogue was written to be recited, not argued. The great Soviet primers set a doctrine down in the impersonal voice of an institute and expect the reader to learn it; their engagement with the philosophers they reject rarely goes past the label. Subject, Object, Cognition is a different kind of book, and it declares the difference on its first page. Its preface is addressed not to a Soviet study-circle but to "the reader abroad," and its complaint is that this reader "is not always fully aware" that Western epistemology's newest preoccupations — the historical development of knowledge, the socio-cultural conditioning of science, the realist interpretation of scientific theories — are, in Lektorsky's phrase, "the most significant traits of the Marxist study of knowledge and cognition." The book that follows is an attempt to prove the claim on the opponent's own ground. Bridgman, Kuhn, Quine, Popper, Piaget, Chomsky, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, intuitionist mathematics, the measurement problem in quantum mechanics — these are not paraded as errors to be denounced but worked through, at length, by a man who has plainly read them and can follow their arguments. It is one of the best philosophy books Progress printed, and taking its measure means first taking it seriously.
Establish the date of the text before anything else, because the spine understates the book's real vintage in an unusual direction. The English edition is 1984; the author's preface to it is signed "Moscow, November 1982," the month Brezhnev died; and the monograph itself, to judge from a bibliography that runs thick through the 1970s and thins out around 1980, belongs to the very end of the Brezhnev era. There is no perestroika here, no glasnost, none of the vocabulary of "renewal" that dates the sibling volumes of the late 1980s. This is a book of the stagnation, written in the years when the political surface of Soviet life was at its most frozen — and it is worth holding that fact beside the intellectual openness of the contents, because the two sit oddly together and the tension between them is the most interesting thing about the volume. Its author, Vladislav Lektorsky, was no apparatus functionary. He was one of the senior epistemologists of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, a specialist in the theory of knowledge and the methodology of science who worked in close contact with the Soviet "activity" school of psychology, and who would in time edit Voprosy filosofii, the flagship journal of the discipline. The commission this book answers is not the cadre manual or the export primer for sympathetic Western communists. It is a bid for parity: a demonstration, aimed at the international philosophy-of-science conversation, that dialectical materialism belonged in it as a live participant rather than a museum exhibit.
What, precisely, is the doctrine it defends? It is the Marxist-Leninist theory of cognition, and its architecture is worth stating carefully, because the criticism to come depends on getting it right. Knowledge, on this account, is a relation between a subject and an object; the object exists outside and independently of the knowing subject; and knowledge is a reflection (otrazhenie) of that object in the subject — not a passive mirror-image, the book insists, but reflection all the same. The pedigree is Lenin's: it was in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), Lektorsky notes, that "an all-sided Marxist analysis of the revolution in natural science was given," and it is Lenin's reflection theory that the whole edifice is built to defend and update. Against idealism — the doctrine that the object is constituted by consciousness — the book asserts the primacy and independence of the material world. Against what it calls "metaphysical" or mechanistic materialism — the doctrine that treats knowing as a merely physical interaction between two natural systems, the object stamping its imprint on a passive subject — it asserts that the subject is active, and that this activity is social, practical, and historical. And the criterion that decides between knowledge and illusion is not contemplation but practice: "Lenin stressed repeatedly," Lektorsky writes, "that Marxism made practice the basis of its epistemology." This is the same doctrine expounded, at the level of a schoolroom, in the fifth chapter of Anatoly Rakitov's The Principles of Philosophy, the reference primer whose introduction in this series should be read alongside this one. Rakitov gives the catechism — matter primary, consciousness a reflection, practice the criterion, and the whole underwritten by partiinost, the party-spirit that assigns every philosophy to a class. Lektorsky gives the research-frontier version of the identical framework, and the interest of putting the two books together is precisely that the sophisticated version and the crude version fail, in the end, at exactly the same seam.
But the failure must wait, because the credit comes first and it is substantial. Lektorsky is a real philosopher and it shows on every page. His central positive idea — that cognition is a "socially-mediated historically developing activity of reflection" — is an honest attempt to repair the weakest point in the inherited doctrine, the passivity of the mirror. He does it by fusing the reflection theory with the "activity approach" of Soviet psychology (Leontyev, Rubinstein, and behind them Vygotsky and Ilyenkov), and the fusion produces genuine philosophical results. His treatment of perception is the best of them. Naive realism holds that we perceive the object directly; Lektorsky shows, with a working command of the experimental psychology of vision, that perception is itself an active, mediated construction, that it "builds something like object-hypotheses," and that these hypotheses are tested and corrected in practical dealings with things. His worked examples are the real texture of philosophy, not illustration pasted onto dogma: "A stick immersed in water seems broken," and it is not sensory error that corrects the illusion but the hand — "once one starts handling that same stick... one perceives it as straight." The account of how the norms and standards of perception are not innate but sedimented into the man-made objects a child learns to use is subtle and, within its frame, persuasive.
The same seriousness governs his engagement with the West. He does not caricature. Of the epistemologies he rejects he says he has tried "to take most careful stock of the arguments used in these theories and to analyse them critically in detail" — and he keeps the promise. His critique of Piaget is a case in point: he credits the Swiss psychologist with a major contribution to understanding how cognitive structures grow out of action, and then locates the precise philosophical limit — "this fundamental fact was discounted by Piaget," namely that the norms mastered in activity are social in origin, not the outcome of an individual's equilibration with a physical environment. His long analysis of Popper's "third world" of objective knowledge is the sharpest passage in the book. Popper had argued that the content of knowledge, once written down, becomes autonomous, a "knowledge without a subject" inhabiting a third realm alongside the physical and the mental. Lektorsky's reply is not a denunciation but a better theory: the objectivity and autonomy Popper rightly noticed are real, but they belong not to a ghostly third world but to what Lektorsky calls the collective subject — the scientific community, the language community, the society whose shared practice carries knowledge across generations. As philosophy of science answering philosophy of science, this holds its own, and a reader who has waded through the rote productions elsewhere on this shelf will feel the difference at once.
One example deserves singling out, because it is exactly the service the export commission wanted and exactly the kind of thing the rote volumes could not perform. Since the 1920s, idealist philosophers had read the measurement problem of quantum mechanics as proof that mind and matter are inseparable — that in observing an electron the physicist half-creates it, so that, as some concluded from Heisenberg, "the distinction between the cognising subject and the cognised object is obliterated." A crude materialism has no answer to this beyond a thump on the table. Lektorsky's answer is patient and correct: the measuring device is itself a material object, its interaction with the quantum object is a material interaction, and the ineliminable role of the apparatus in fixing a result is not the intrusion of a mind but the mediation of one material system by another. The subject does not dissolve into the object; a particular, socially constructed instrument stands between them. This is dialectical materialism doing real work in a live scientific controversy, refereeing a dispute that working physicists actually had — and it is the sort of passage that justifies the book's claim to belong in the international conversation rather than merely to comment on it from outside. The tragedy of the book is that the very acuity Lektorsky brings to the material mediation of physical knowledge deserts him the moment the mediation to be examined is social and close to home.
And yet the book fails, and it fails at the point where its sophistication should have saved it, and the failure is the more instructive for that. The doctrine Lektorsky wields contains a universal solvent, the same acid every book in this series pours over its enemies: the claim that knowledge is class-conditioned, that the practice of a definite social class sets the horizon of what its members can know. Lektorsky applies it with unusual rigour and unusual honesty. In the book's culminating chapter on the collective subject, he builds a whole hierarchy of such subjects — the individual, the scientific community bound to a paradigm, the community of speakers of a language, and finally the social class — and states the class principle in its most general and most dangerous form: "The type of social practice characteristic of a given class determines the horizon of the cognitive possibilities open to its members." This is a powerful and genuinely reflexive thought. It says that no knower stands outside society; that what any collective subject can know is bounded by what it does; that cognition is always somebody's, produced from a particular social location for particular practical ends. Carried through, it would oblige the philosopher to ask of his own knowledge the question he asks of everyone else's: from what social practice does it proceed, and whose interest does it serve?
He does not carry it through. At the decisive line the solvent is switched off. "The Marxist theory of society expressing the interests of the proletariat provides, for the first time, a scientific basis for the study of the social processes." The horizon of every class's cognition is set by its practice — except one. The proletariat, and the doctrine that speaks for it, is the single collective subject whose social location yields not a bounded, interested view but objective science as such. The category that explains all thought as the practice-bound product of a class is never turned on the thought doing the explaining. This is exactly the exemption the introduction to Rakitov's primer identifies at the level of general doctrine — there stated as the rule that error is admissible but the category is not, that a Bolshevik may be granted a mistake so long as the classification never turns inward. Lektorsky performs the same operation in the pure theory of knowledge, and the sophistication of his version makes it visible in a way the primers' does not. He has told us that the proper object of epistemology is not the lone consciousness but "the functioning and development of systems of collective, inter-subject activity based on practical transformation of external objects." Very well: which system, whose activity, transforming what, in whose interest? The whole book is a demonstration that objective knowledge is the product of a determinate social practice — and the one social practice it never submits to that analysis is the practice of the society producing the book: the practice, that is, of a particular ruling apparatus with a direct and material interest in what shall count as known. "Practice" is the criterion of truth; but practice in this book is an abstraction, a philosopher's praxis in general, never the concrete practice of the Soviet state in 1982, which had its own quite specific view of which cognitions were permissible and which collective subjects were entitled to have them.
Here the reply tradition can be exact, and it can begin from a text Lektorsky himself puts on the table. The intellectual charge against the reflection theory has always been that "reflection" is too passive a metaphor for Marx's materialism — that a mirror registers but does not act, and that Marx's whole break with the older materialism lay in making the subject active. Lektorsky knows this perfectly well; he quotes the founding text of the objection, the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach (1845), that "the chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included)" is that it grasps its object "only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively." He knows, in other words, that Marx's materialism is a materialism of practice, and his answer is to graft activity onto reflection and call the compound "a consistent defence of the unity of reflection and activity." But the graft can never quite take, and the reason is not philosophical incompetence — Lektorsky has more than enough of the necessary skill — but political constraint. The master-category has to remain reflection, because reflection is Lenin's word, fixed in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as the boundary marker of orthodoxy, and a Soviet epistemologist of 1982 could extend Lenin, refine Lenin, modernise Lenin, but not displace him. So activity is admitted as far as the psychology of perception and no further. It is never allowed to reach the one place where an active, practical, self-critical materialism must finally arrive: the practical, interested, criticisable character of the knower's own society. Marx's eleventh thesis — that philosophers have interpreted the world and the point is to change it — is safe so long as the world to be changed is always someone else's.
Trotsky drew the consequence for Soviet thought half a century before Lektorsky wrote, and drawing it holds our own tradition to its standard as much as it convicts his. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936) — the book against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this catalogue must be read — he observed that "in spite of the fact that Marxism is formally a state doctrine in the Soviet Union, there has not appeared during the last twelve years one Marxian investigation — in economics, sociology, history or philosophy — which deserves attention." The Marxian works of the bureaucracy, he wrote, do no more than "shuffle over the same old quotations according to the demands of the current administrative conjuncture," so that from a comparison of successive editions of one book one could "trace infallibly the process of degeneration of the thought and conscience of the ruling stratum." Now, in strict fairness — the kind this series owes its own side no less than its opponents — Subject, Object, Cognition is a partial refutation of that sweeping verdict. It is a Marxian philosophical investigation that does deserve attention; it does not merely shuffle quotations; a real mind is at work in it. The interstices of the stagnation were wider than Trotsky's 1936 polemic, written in the white heat of the Terror, allowed. But the deeper half of his point survives the correction intact, and it survives it precisely here. The one thing the state doctrine forbids, even to its ablest servant, is the turning of the method upon "the current administrative conjuncture" itself — upon the ruling stratum as a social formation with interests of its own. Lektorsky's collective-subject hierarchy climbs from the individual through the paradigm and the language to the class and stops, one rung short, at the society; it never asks what stratum within that society had appointed itself the guardian of the collective subject's knowledge, or what its interest in that guardianship was. The degeneration Trotsky traced in the doctored footnotes to Lenin is the same exemption, meaner and cruder in the primers, elegant and self-aware in Lektorsky, but the same: the analysis of everyone, offered by a "we" that is never itself analysed.
There is a smaller reply that completes the frame, and this series has printed it before. A living dialectic must be able to turn on its own formulations; a state philosophy cannot afford to. The point is made in the companion primer George Novack wrote for worker-activists during his party's Smith Act trial — An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971, from the lectures of 1942) — which opens by refusing the very move Soviet epistemology is built on: dialectics is "not a closed system" but "an open system," and "all formulas must be provisional, limited, approximate... This must also apply to the science of dialectics." This must also apply to the science of dialectics. That clause is the one a certified state doctrine cannot say, because a method obliged to turn on its own certification will sooner or later be turned on the authority that issues the certificate. Lektorsky's book is the most sophisticated demonstration in this whole catalogue of exactly how far a genuine philosopher can travel while leaving that clause unsaid — and of where, invariably, the road stops.
Which is the reason to read it, and to read it with more sympathy than contempt. Subject, Object, Cognition is not a bad book pretending to be good; it is a good book with one prohibited thought at its centre, and the prohibition is not the author's cowardice but the frame's condition of existence. Everything Lektorsky does well — the fine anatomy of perception, the fair and searching arguments with Piaget and Popper and Quine, the real feel for the sciences he draws on — is what makes the single silence audible. He could describe with great precision how the collective subject constructs its objective world, and he could not name the collective subject he was writing inside. That a philosopher of this calibre came so close to the reflexive turn, took it in every direction but one, and stopped exactly at the threshold of his own society, is the most exact record we have of what it cost to think seriously about knowledge in the Soviet Union at the end of the Brezhnev years. The book is worth the shelf it occupies. So is the question it could not put to itself.