2. The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism – II¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 2: The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism – II¶
This chapter advances the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge by grounding it in practice, refuting the agnostic and idealist deviations of empirio-criticism. Lenin begins by restating Engels’s division of philosophy into materialism (nature primary, spirit secondary) and idealism (the reverse). The second side of the fundamental philosophical question concerns whether thought can correctly reflect the real world. The overwhelming majority answer yes, including consistent idealists like Hegel; a minority, including Hume and Kant, question or deny exhaustive cognition. Engels refutes these “crotchets” by appeal to practice: if we can produce a natural process ourselves, the Kantian unknowable ‘thing-in-itself’ ends. Alizarin, once a ‘thing-in-itself’, became a ‘thing-for-us’ when organic chemistry produced it from coal tar.
Lenin exposes V. Chernov’s misrepresentation that Engels refuted the thing-in-itself as such, when in fact Engels refuted the unknowable thing-in-itself, confusing the unknown with the unknowable. Three epistemological conclusions follow: things exist independently of consciousness; there is no principled difference between phenomenon and thing-in-itself, only between known and unknown; and knowledge emerges from ignorance dialectically. The sole deduction is that our perceptions are images of the external world. Marx’s second Thesis on Feuerbach confirms this, asserting objective truth is proved in practice.
Engels deliberately criticises the entire Humean line of agnosticism, which does not go beyond sensations and claims no certain knowledge of their source. Both Mill’s “permanent possibility of sensation” and Mach’s “complexes of elements” remain within agnosticism. Engels refutes this by arguing that human action provides the test: if we successfully use objects according to the qualities we perceive, this proves our perceptions agree with reality outside ourselves. Bazarov falsely claims Engels is attacking Kantian idealism, but Engels’s argument contains no mention of Kantianism—idealism begins when things are said to be sensations, Kantianism when the thing-in-itself is held unknowable. Bazarov’s Machian distortion that sense-perception “is the reality existing outside us” is rejected; Engels’s German word stimmen mit means “correspond with”, not “be identical”. The Earth existed before any sense-organs, so sense-perception cannot be identical with external reality.
Feuerbach and Dietzgen are quoted to refute the Machian claim that Marx and Engels denied the existence and knowability of things-in-themselves. Feuerbach defines the “world in itself” as existing without us, directly opposing Kant’s abstraction without reality; for Feuerbach, the thing-in-itself is an abstraction with reality, completely knowable and not fundamentally different from appearance. Dietzgen states the world-in-itself and the world as it appears differ only as whole from part, with no essential difference. Bogdanov’s denial of unconditional objective truth, calling truth an organising form of human experience, is agnosticism and subjectivism. If truth is only an organising form of human experience, then Catholicism is also true, opening the door for clericalism.
The decisive question distinguishing materialism from subjectivism is: does objective reality belong to perception as its source? A yes answer is materialism; a no leads to subjectivism or agnosticism. The concept matter is a philosophical category denoting objective reality given in sensation, existing independently of man. Confusing particular theories of matter’s structure with this epistemological category is unpardonable. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, the limits of approximation to objective, absolute truth are historically conditional, but the existence of such truth and the fact of approaching it are unconditional. Relativism as the basis of the theory of knowledge denies any objective measure and justifies sophistry; dialectics contains relativism but is not reducible to it.
Practice is the criterion of materialist theory of knowledge. Marx and Engels placed practice at the foundation, arguing that the dispute over thinking isolated from practice is scholastic. Mach removes practice from epistemology, treating it as separate from theory. For materialists, the success of human practice proves the correspondence