Materialism and Empirio-criticism

Why did the revolutionary Lenin write a book on epistemology?

In 1908 Lenin, in exile after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, suddenly devoted months to writing a book of philosophy. On the surface it is an abstract dispute about the relation between sensation, matter and knowledge, but for Lenin the party's direction was at stake. Alexander Bogdanov, a Bolshevik theorist and member of the leadership, and his colleagues wanted to turn Marxist philosophy into the latest philosophy of science, and the same people were leading otzovism, the demand to recall the Duma deputies, and God-Building.

Lenin opened the preface to the first edition: "A whole number of writers who wish to be Marxists have this year launched a veritable campaign against the philosophy of Marxism in our country." In less than six months, he noted, four books attacking dialectical materialism had appeared, among them the collection Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism (1908) with articles by Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Berman, Gelfond, Yushkevich and Suvorov.

Целый ряд писателей, желающих быть марксистами, предприняли у нас в текущем году настоящий поход против философии марксизма.

The book was above all a reply to Bogdanov's three-volume Empiriomonism (1904–1906). Lenin wrote most of it in Geneva and spent a month in the library of the British Museum in London reading the latest philosophical and scientific material. It came out in Moscow in May 1909 from the Zveno publishing house under the pseudonym "Vl. Ilyin", with some passages altered to get past the tsarist censor.

What did Lenin argue?

The empirio-criticism of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach and the Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius treated the world as complexes of sensory elements and rejected a "thing in itself" or matter beyond sensation as a metaphysical assumption. The Russian Machists thought this more scientific than the old materialism. Lenin replied that it merely repeated, in new terms, the subjective idealism of the eighteenth-century Bishop Berkeley, and that pushed to its end it led to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but one's own sensations. As Engels had said, the fundamental question of philosophy is which comes first, matter or consciousness, and Machism, Lenin argued, took the idealist side of that question while pretending to be neutral.

As the alternative Lenin offered his famous definition of matter: "Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man in his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them." This is the so-called theory of reflection. Lenin stressed that the definition was not tied to any particular doctrine of physics. With the discovery of the electron and radioactivity, talk that "matter has disappeared" was going round; Lenin answered that what had disappeared was only the limit of our knowledge of matter, and called the use of this as an argument for idealism "physical idealism". The only "property" of matter that philosophical materialism must recognise, he held, is that of being objective reality outside our consciousness.

Материя есть философская категория для обозначения объективной реальности, которая дана человеку в ощущениях его, которая копируется, фотографируется, отображается нашими ощущениями, существуя независимо от них.

The final chapter, on empirio-criticism and historical materialism, put forward the principle that philosophy, too, is partisan. For Lenin the struggle of idealism and materialism was ultimately bound up with the interests of classes in society, and the Machists' philosophy touched the politics of the period of reaction by opening the way to religious faith (fideism).

How does it connect with God-Building and the reception of Nietzsche?

The book can hardly be read apart from the God-Building controversy of the same year. Lunacharsky and Bazarov tried to weave Mach's epistemology, Feuerbach's religion of humanity and Nietzsche's idea of the creation of values into a socialism refashioned as a new religion, and Lenin attacked their philosophical basis in this book. In June 1909 the Bolshevik leadership pushed Bogdanov out of the faction, and the following year Bogdanov published a reply charging that Lenin had reduced philosophy to ideology. The book was thus Lenin's answer to the Russian intellectuals who, under the influence of Nietzsche and Mach, set out to rewrite Marxism.

How has the book been read?

After the revolution it was republished in Russian in 1920, became an obligatory subject in every institution of higher education in the Soviet Union, and, translated into more than twenty languages, a classic of Marxist–Leninist philosophy. Lenin, however, could not see Engels's Dialectics of Nature: the manuscript lay for thirty years in the archives of German Social Democracy and was published in the Soviet Union only in 1925. And since Lenin himself treated dialectics far more deeply in the Philosophical Notebooks he left while rereading Hegel's Logic in 1914–1915, the relation between this reflection-centred book and the Notebooks has long been debated.

Criticism also came from within Marxism. The Dutch astronomer and council communist Anton Pannekoek, in Lenin as Philosopher, published in 1938 under the pseudonym "John Harper", argued that Lenin had not properly understood Mach and Avenarius. Karl Korsch held that Russia's backwardness had kept Lenin in a rigidly dualist view of matter and mind, and that as a result he lost Marx's dialectical relation of theory and practice. Max Horkheimer also wrote on the book. Louis Althusser, on the other hand, praised Lenin's idea of a partisan intervention within philosophy in his 1968 lecture "Lenin and Philosophy".