Joseph Petzoldt, The Problem of the Worldfromthe Standpoint of Positivism,
Translated from the German by R. L. Edited by P. Yushkevich. Siiipovnik
Publishers. St. Petersburg, 1909

p This book is apparently destined to have conspicuous success among certain circles of our reading public. First, it provides an exposition of a philosophy now fashionable in these circles. According to J. Petzoldt, the aim of the book is "to explain the usually falsely construed central point of the positivist understanding of the world, substantiated by Wilhelm Schuppe, Ernst Mach, and Richard Avenarius, and to comprehend this world-outlook as historically necessary, logically inevitable and therefore, most probably, final in its essential features".  [424•*  That will suffice at present to attract the attention of numerous readers to the work concerned; and apart from this, Petzoldt knows how to write with great clarity. True, it is not that scrupulous clarity which helps one to overcome the difficulties of the subject, but that deceptive clarity which tends to conceal them from the reader. It is the clarity of very superficial thinking, which brings its work to a halt just where its main task begins. But this is not a bad thing. A very superficial philosophy is just what we need at present. The reading public which is buying up the works of the Bogdanovs, Valentinovs, and Yushkeviches, and leaving unsold in book stores such a splendid work as Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach,—this reading public does not have and never will have the slightest need of profound philosophical works. Hence there is every reason to expect that Petzoldt’s The Problem of the World will quickly run into several editions.

p But since I do not share the philosophical infatuation fashionable just now, and since I am not content with the sort of clarity that conceals the difficulties of a subject instead of helping to overcome them, I consider it worth while subjecting to criticism the principal ideas set forth in Petzoldt’s book. Who can tell? Perhaps I shall find a reader who prefers to use his own brains for thinking rather than to follow the latest fashion in philosophy. Anything can happen in this world!

p The fundamental idea of Petzoldt’s whole book is expressed by the author himself in the following words: "There is no world– in-itself, there is only a world for us. Its elements are not atoms and not other absolute beings, but the ’sensations’ of colour, sound, touch, space, time, etc. In spite of this, things are not only subjective, not only phenomena of consciousness—on the contrary, we must conceive of the parts of our environment, composed of these elements, as existing in the same manner both at the moment of perception and when we no longer perceive them."  [425•* 

I leave aside for the time being the question of what is meant exactly by the proposition that “sensations” must be regarded as fundamental elements of the world. I will dwell at present on the following: "There is no world-m-ifeeZ/, there is only a world for us." So Petzoldt assures us. We believe him and say: "Since there is no world-in-itself, there is nothing objective; all things are subjective and the world is only our idea of it.” We wish to be consistent, but Petzoldt does not want that. No, he objects, in spite of there being only the world for us, this world is not only our idea of it, and things are not only subjective; they are not only phenomena of our consciousness. Let us admit that too: we believe Petzoldt. But what is the meaning of: things are not only subjective, they are not only phenomena of our consciousness? It means that in spite of there being only the "world for us”, there is also the “world-in-itself”. But if there is the worldin-itself, then Petzoldt is wrong in proclaiming that the world– in-itself does not exist. What are we to do now? What are we to believe? To extricate us from this difficulty, our author advises us, as we know, to conceive of the parts of our environment as "existing in the same manner both at the moment of perception and when we no longer perceive them”. But unfortunately this advice does not in the least get us out of our difficulties. The question here is not what things are like at the moment we do not perceive them, but whether they exist independently of our perception. According to Petzoldt, this question can only be answered affirmatively; yes, things exist independently of our perception, that is to say, they do not cease to be when we stop perceiving them. But this reply does not correspond to what Petzoldt himself thinks and says. To say that a thing does not cease to exist even when we cease to perceive it is the same as saying that it has being which does not cease even when the thing no longer exists "/or us". Then what sort of being is this? The answer is as clear as twice two are four: it is being-in-itself. But Petzoldt assures us that there is no being-in-itself. Again I ask: what are we to do, 426 which Petzoldt are we to believe? The Petzoldt who reiterates that there is "no world-in-itself" or the one who proves that the world exists even independently of our perception of it, i.e., that there is a world-in-itself? This is a question truly in the mood of Hamlet! Let us work out the answer for ourselves, since it is useless to expect help from our author—he himself does not “sense” the contradiction in which he is so ludicrously struggling.