1. The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism – I¶
Core Argument¶
This opening chapter establishes the fundamental epistemological opposition between dialectical materialism and empirio-criticism, which Lenin identifies as a thinly veiled revival of Berkeleian subjective idealism. Mach’s 1872 definition of physics as the study of laws of connection of sensations, and his subsequent assertion in Mechanics (1883) that things are merely mental symbols for complexes of sensations, directly contradicts the materialist position consistently maintained by Engels: that sensations are images or reflections of things existing independently of consciousness. Lenin exposes Mach’s “discovery of the world-elements” as a rhetorical trick: all that exists is declared sensation, then sensations are renamed “elements” and divided into physical and psychical depending on functional dependence, supposedly overcoming one-sidedness while actually smuggling materialism back into an idealist framework.
Avenarius’s 1876 work Philosophy as a Conception of the World begins from explicit idealism, arguing that only sensation can be thought of as existing—sensation without substance, thought without brain. His later doctrine of “introjection” is not a refutation of idealism but its defence, denying that thought is a function of the brain and contradicting basic physiology to undermine materialism. The doctrine of the “principal co-ordination”—the indissoluble connection of self and environment—merely paraphrases Fichte’s subjective idealism. When natural science asserts that the Earth existed before humans, Avenarius introduces the “potential” central term, making existence conditional on the possibility of mentally projecting a spectator. Petzoldt’s attempt to salvage this with an a priori “law of unique determination” imported from Kant only destroys the theory of “complexes of sensations” entirely.
Lenin demonstrates that philosophers of various schools recognise this: Wundt calls empirio-criticism a “motley mixture” with materialist morsels; Ewald notes it combines contradictory elements; Norman Smith argues it is a restatement of subjective idealism. The only solution compatible with natural science is the materialist recognition that the external world reflected by our mind exists independently of our mind. Feuerbach had already refuted the idealist sophistry that because nature is thought of by you, it did not exist without you. The chapter concludes that empirio-criticism, when logically extended, leads inevitably to solipsism—a fact its proponents refuse to acknowledge.