4. The Philosophical Idealists as Comrades-In-Arms and Successors of Empirio-Criticism¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 4: The Philosophical Idealists as Comrades-In-Arms and Successors of Empirio-Criticism¶
This chapter demonstrates that Mach and Avenarius, far from inaugurating a new philosophical departure, merely revived the subjective idealism of Berkeley and the agnosticism of Hume. Both began from Kant, but their criticism of him came not from the materialist Left but from the Right, rejecting the thing-in-itself as a concession to materialism. Lenin shows that Avenarius’s claim to “purify” Kantian experience by eliminating apriorism had already been made by Schulze-Aenesidemus and Fichte. The principal feature of Kant’s philosophy is a compromise between materialism and idealism; materialists criticise him for his idealism, while agnostics and idealists criticise him for conceding to materialism. The Russian Machians, following the latter line, thus aligned themselves with the sceptical and idealist tradition.
The immanentists—Schuppe, Leclair, Rehmke, and Schubert-Soldern—are identified as the true philosophical progenitors of Machism. These rank reactionaries and open advocates of fideism, whom Mach and Avenarius acknowledged as close kin, explicitly reject materialism. Leclair defines nature as a “phenomenon of consciousness” and all existence as “complexes of sensations.” Schuppe asserts that “being is consciousness,” a position identical to Avenarius’s “principal co-ordination.” Schubert-Soldern, whose chief enemy is the materialism of natural science, openly admits epistemological solipsism and argues that if the individual self is destroyed, the world is annihilated, concluding that the self must continue after death. Mach’s acknowledged disciples—Cornelius, Kleinpeter, and Ziehen—confirm this trajectory, arriving at immortality, God, and the primacy of subjective conviction.
Lenin turns to Bogdanov’s “empirio-monism,” contending that his claim that physical nature is a “product” of immediate psychical experience is pure idealism, functionally identical to Hegel’s Absolute Idea or Schopenhauer’s Will. Bogdanov’s ladder—from a chaos of “elements” (sensations) through psychical to physical experience—is nonsense, because science knows no sensations prior to man or the physical world. His “theory of general substitution” is an idealist abstraction requiring only a single materialist step to discard.
The chapter also examines Helmholtz’s inconsistent theory of symbols, which wavered between Kantianism and materialism. Materialists went Left from Helmholtz, Machians Right. Engels criticised vulgar materialists like Büchner and Dühring not for their materialism but for failing to advance it dialectically. Dietzgen, nine-tenths a materialist, made muddled statements that Machians seize upon while ignoring his consistent defence of objective truth. Plekhanov’s error in describing sensations as “hieroglyphs” was a concession to agnosticism, though he later admitted his inexact expression. The road from Marx to Dietzgen’s peculiarities, to Mach, to the immanentists leads into a morass.