Materialism and Empiro-criticism (Part 9)

In this section Lenin discusses the views of two materialists, Feuerbach and Dietzgen. Feuerbach is a classical materialist, not a dialectical materialist, but his philosophy is the link between Hegel and Marx and Engels. The thing-in-itself for Feuerbach is something “existing objectively outside of us,” Lenin says, and acting “upon our sense-organs…. Sensation is a subjective image of the objective world, of the world AN UND FUR SICH” [i.e., in and for-itself].

This view of Feuerbach is basic to all forms of materialism. “The ‘doctrine’ of Machism that since we know “only sensation,” Lenin concludes, “we cannot know of the EXISTENCE of anything beyond the bounds of sensation, is an old sophistry of idealist and agnostic philosophy served up with a new sauce.”

I suspect that most readers have heard about Feuerbach and may something of his materialism from the writings of Marx and Engels. If you want to read something by him I recommend his THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY, which as been translated into English by George Eliot.

However, you may not be as familiar with Joseph Dietzgen, the next person discussed by Lenin. Dietzgen (1828-1888) was a self educated German tanner who independently developed a philosophy of dialectical materialism. He was extremely influential in the socialist movement in the last half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. If you Google his name you will find some interesting articles about him.

Lenin quotes Dietzgen, as an independent materialist: “Unhealthy mysticism unscientifically separates the absolute truth from the relative truth. It makes of the thing as it appears and the ‘thing-in-itself’, that is, of the appearance and the verity, two categories which differ TOTO COELO [completely, fundamentally] from each other and are not contained in any common category.”

When trying to explain the relation of perception to the thing-in-itself we have already seen how the Russian Machists, especially Bogdanov, confuse the materialist position with Kantianism and agnosticism. “The reason for Bogdanov’s distortion of materialism,” according to Lenin, “lies in his failure to understand the relation of absolute truth to relative truth (of which we shall speak later).”

Does Objective Truth Exist?

Bogdanov, in his book “Empirio-monism” tries to explain what constitutes “objective” truth. Truth, he tells us, “is an ideological form, an organising form of human experience….” But, Lenin says, “If truth is ONLY an ideological form, there can be no truth independent of the subject, of humanity, for neither Bogdanov nor we know any other ideology but human ideology.” But this is absurd for science tells us it is a truth that the earth existed prior to man and his ideologies!

Is this subjectivism some failing in Bogdanov as a person? Lenin thinks not. Bogdanov personally “refuses to own himself a Machist” but still is influenced by the “new” philosophy. It is this mixture of Marxism and Machism that causes the muddle of Empirio-monism. Thus, “Bogdanov’s denial of objective truth is an inevitable consequence of Machism as a whole and not a deviation from it.” His deviation is from materialism.

Engels, who criticises both Hume and Kant, even states that Hegel had in fact refuted the main points in both their philosophies. Lenin then quotes Hegel: “For empiricism the external in general is the truth, and if then a supersensible too be admitted, nevertheless knowledge of it cannot occur and one must keep exclusively to what belongs to perception. However, this principle in its realisation produced what was subsequently termed MATERIALISM. This materialism regards matter, as such, as the truly objective.” But Lenin does not here follow up on Hegel who was not himself a materialist.

Instead, he agrees that experience is the source of all knowledge and that materialists hold that OBJECTIVE REALITY is the source of experience. If you don’t hold to this view you become inconsistent and the “inconsistency of your empiricism, of your philosophy of experience, will in that case lie in the fact that you deny the objective content of experience, the objective truth of knowledge through experience.”

The Machists think that the “new” physics has made the views of the older materialists “antiquated.” Now Lenin was writing a hundred years ago and physics has moved on a pace but he is right when he says it is “unpardonable to confuse, as the Machists do, any particular theory of the structure of matter with the epistemological category, to confuse the problem of the new properties of new aspects of matter (electrons for example) with the old problem of the theory of knowledge, with the problem of the sources of our knowledge, the existence of objective truth, etc.”

This category, “matter”, which refers to the objective reality revealed to humans by means of their sense organs has not become “antiquated”, Lenin says, since the days of Plato and Democritus.