Hegel, Part 9a
Pablo
Picasso, 1937: “Guernica”
Lenin on the Theory of Knowledge
The Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge
Lenin’s 1908 “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” is a full-length book, but a difficult one to
include under any particular category. It is a polemic against Ernst
Mach and his Russian followers, whom Lenin said had little to
distinguish themselves from the 18th-century subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley. This controversy
does not seem quite so important today as it may have been in 1908, but it is
still useful.
Our text from Lenin’s book is
“The
Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge” (download linked
below).
It begins: “We have seen that Marx in 1845 and
Engels in 1888 and 1892 placed the criterion of practice at the basis of the
materialist theory of knowledge.” This shows up some of our difficulty in
the field of Marxian philosophy. As the footnote says, Lenin is referring to
Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)
and to the works by F. Engels: “Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1888) and
the “Special
Introduction to the English Edition of 1892” of his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.
The latter pamphlet is made
out of excerpts from Engel’s “Anti-Dühring”, while the “Theses
on Feuerbach” are part of “The German Ideology”,
a book written between 1845 and 1847 by Marx and Engels and then abandoned “to
the gnawing criticism of the mice”.
Karl Marx had a Doctorate in
Philosophy but he did not, as a “Marxist”, write a book of philosophy as such,
except insofar as his long “Capital” project could be taken as philosophy, and
there are indeed some philosophical statements here and there among the
preparatory works and in the three originally-published volumes of “Capital”.
So, what is linked from this
post comprises the major part of the overtly philosophical work of Marx, Engels
and Lenin. It is a tiny amount when compared to the world’s literature on
philosophy.
It is therefore clear that
the classical literature does not provide us with a full, exclusively Marxist
exposition of philosophy. Perhaps this is fitting, because Marxism is after all
not outside of the main stream of learning. As we have seen, it is a
continuation of, as well as a reaction to, Hegel’s work, while Hegel’s work
stands in a similar relation to Kant’s, and so on.
Taken together, all this
means that for the philosophy that is necessary for revolution, the
revolutionaries will have to go beyond Marx and Engels, and study the full
discipline of philosophy, its history, its development and its meaning. This is
exactly what Lenin began to do in the early 1900s.
In “Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism” Lenin quotes Hegel several times in passing, and briefly,
though not in this particular chapter. It would seem that Lenin’s interest in
Hegel really only got going later, at about the time (1914) when he prepared
his ‘Conspectus
of Hegel’s book “The Science of Logic”’. The Lenin Philosophy Archive
on MIA is here.
Lenin is saying in this short
chapter that that the test of truth is practice, and this provides us with a
continuity in relation to our previous instalment, from Ilyenkov.
The next part will be the
last in this Hegel series.
Picture:
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. Picasso
was the most distinguished painter of the 20th Century, and a
communist. His famous mural depicting the fascist aerial bombing of the Spanish
village of Guernica is now at the United Nations.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The
Criterion of Practice in the Theory of Knowledge, Lenin, 1908.