Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

Contents

1. Author’s Preface to the First Edition 5 min 7

   Lenin’s preface of September 1908 names his targets: four recent Russian books, among them the collective Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism by Bazarov, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky and others, that attack dialectical materialism while claiming to be Marxist. He calls this “philosophic revisionism” and “mutiny on one’s knees”, charges the authors with sliding into fideism, and offers the book as a “seeker’s” attempt to find what has gone wrong with them.

2. Author’s Preface to the Second Edition 1 min 2

   In the 1920 preface Lenin says the text is essentially unchanged and hopes it will help readers study Marxist philosophy and the philosophical lessons of recent natural science. He appends V. I. Nevsky’s article on Bogdanov, whose “proletarian culture” he calls a cover for bourgeois and reactionary views.

3. Introduction: How Certain “Marxists” in 1908 and Certain Idealists in 1710 Refuted Materialism 46 min 24

   Lenin argues that the Machists’ objections to materialism are not new. Bishop Berkeley made them all in 1710: things are “collections of ideas”, “to exist is to be perceived”, and matter is an empty abstraction whose removal protects religion. Lenin sets Berkeley’s subjective idealism, Hume’s agnosticism and Diderot’s materialism side by side. Using Engels’s division of philosophers into two camps, he concludes that Mach and Avenarius repeat Berkeley in new terminology.

4. I The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectic Materialism I 2 h 25 min 82

   Lenin examines the founding doctrines of empirio-criticism: Mach’s claim that bodies are “complexes of sensations” or neutral “elements”, Avenarius’s “principal co-ordination” of self and environment, and his theory of “introjection”. He argues that each is subjective idealism leading to solipsism, kept respectable by importing materialist assumptions. His test cases are the existence of nature before man and the brain as the organ of thought. He cites idealist critics who reached the same verdict.

5. II The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectic Materialism II 2 h 0 min 44

   Lenin defends Engels on the thing-in-itself against Chernov and Bazarov. Practice, as in the synthesis of alizarin, turns things-in-themselves into things-for-us, so there is no barrier between appearance and reality, only between the known and the not-yet-known. He enlists Feuerbach and Dietzgen and defines matter as objective reality given in sensation. Against Bogdanov’s socially organized “truth” he defends objective truth, explains absolute truth as built from relative truths, and makes practice the criterion of knowledge.

6. III The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and Dialectic Materialism III 2 h 7 min 72

   Lenin examines the core concepts of the theory of knowledge one by one. Matter, he argues, can only be defined as the objective reality that acts on our senses, and “experience” is a word under which empirio-critics hide both materialism and idealism. A digression corrects Plekhanov. On causality, Feuerbach and Engels recognise objective law in nature, while Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt and Pearson follow Hume or Kant. The “economy of thought” presupposes correctness; space and time are objective forms of being; and Engels’s account of freedom as the recognition of necessity assumes a necessity existing before we know it.

7. IV The Philosophic Idealists as Associates and Successors of Empirio-Criticists 2 h 25 min 96

   Lenin places empirio-criticism historically. Mach and Avenarius criticised Kant “from the right,” like Schulze and Fichte, rejecting his thing-in-itself, while Feuerbach, Rau, Lafargue and Kautsky criticised him “from the left” for not being materialist enough. He traces Mach’s kinship with the religious “immanentist” school, follows his disciples (Cornelius, Kleinpeter, Ziehen, Carus) into idealism and theology, and dismantles Bogdanov’s “empiriomonism.” He then corrects Plekhanov’s “hieroglyphs,” shows that Engels criticised Büchner and Dühring as inconsistent materialists, and defends Dietzgen against admirers who made a system of his confusions.

8. V The Latest Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophic Idealism 2 h 45 min 59

   Lenin turns to the “crisis” in physics after X-rays, radioactivity and the electron. Using Abel Rey and others, he argues that the dispute between “symbolist” physicists (Mach, Poincaré, Duhem, Pearson) and “realists” (Rücker, Boltzmann, the neo-mechanists) is a dispute between idealist and materialist theories of knowledge. That “matter has disappeared” means only that an old picture of matter has gone; materialism’s sole claim is that matter exists outside the mind. Physicists fell into idealism through ignorance of dialectics, he concludes, but physics is “giving birth” to dialectical materialism.

9. VI Empirio-Criticism and Historical Materialism 1 h 46 min 45

   Lenin examines empirio-criticism applied to society. Blei attacks Marx as a “metaphysician”; Petzoldt deduces social harmony from a “tendency to stability”; Bogdanov identifies social being with social consciousness and recasts Marx in biological and energy terms; Suvorov invents a “law of economy of forces.” Against them Lenin holds that social consciousness reflects social being. He then argues that philosophy is partisan, materialism against idealism, and that the professors’ neutrality serves fideism. The reception of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe proves the point.

10. Conclusion 4 min 2

    Lenin sums up the book under four heads: empirio-criticism repeats old idealist errors; it moved from Kant back to Hume and Berkeley and allied with the immanentists; it is tied to a passing “idealistic physics”; and behind it lies a partisan struggle in which non-partisanship serves fideism.

11. Supplement to Chapter IV, § 1: From What Angle Did Chernyshevsky Approach the Criticism of Kantianism? 6 min 4

    A short appendix to Chapter IV, § 1. Lenin quotes Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1888 preface to The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, which criticised Kant’s view that knowledge is merely subjective. Lenin’s bracketed glosses claim Chernyshevsky as a consistent materialist who attacked Kant from the opposite side to Mach, though backward Russian conditions kept him from dialectical materialism.