Supplement to Chapter 4, Section 1 [1]¶
Core Argument¶
This supplement, inserted by Lenin while Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was already in press, serves to reinforce a central polemical distinction: materialist criticism of Kant proceeds from a direction diametrically opposite to that of the Machians and immanentists. Lenin draws on the example of N. G. Chernyshevsky, the great Russian Hegelian and materialist, to demonstrate this. Chernyshevsky, a follower of Feuerbach, attempted as early as the 1850s to state his position, but tsarist censorship prevented him from even naming Feuerbach. In a preface written in 1888 for a projected third edition of The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality, finally published only in 1906, Chernyshevsky devoted half a page to a critique of Kant and the natural scientists who followed him.
Lenin reproduces Chernyshevsky’s argument at length, interspersing his own glosses for the benefit of the “Russian Machians who manage to muddle everything.” Chernyshevsky charges that natural scientists who build all-embracing theories are poor disciples of the metaphysicians whose systems were destroyed by Schelling and Hegel. They merely repeat Kant’s metaphysical theory regarding the subjectivity of knowledge: that the forms of sense-perception have no resemblance to the forms of actual existence; that things-in-themselves are unknowable; that thought shapes all material into forms totally different from actual existence; that the laws of thought have only subjective significance; and that there is no objective causality. Chernyshevsky denounces this as “metaphysical nonsense.”
Lenin’s glosses make explicit the materialist counter-position. For Chernyshevsky, as for every materialist, the forms of sense-perception do resemble the objectively-real forms of objects; things-in-themselves are fully knowable; the laws of thought reflect the forms of actual existence; and objective causality exists in reality. Lenin notes that Chernyshevsky is below Engels insofar as he confuses the opposition between materialism and idealism with that between metaphysical and dialectical thought, but is entirely on Engels’ level in taking Kant to task not for realism but for agnosticism and subjectivism. Chernyshevsky spurned the “wretched nonsense” of Neo-Kantians, positivists and Machians, and remained on the level of integral philosophical materialism from the 1850s until 1888, though he could not rise to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels owing to the backwardness of Russian life. The supplement is thus a tactical deployment of a native Russian materialist authority to expose the Machians as muddleheads who have abandoned materialism for subjectivism.