In 1909, Vladimir Lenin published a book entitled Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which took aim at the at-the-time fashionable philosophy of ‘empirio-criticism’. Founded by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius and closely associated with the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, empirico-criticism sought to rid philosophy of a-priori assumptions and the mind-body dualism that historically separated the inner mental world from the outer physical world. Lenin’s analysis in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was soon overtaken by the new scientific theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity, as a result of which the book is usually overlooked, even by hardened Marxists.
A core thread running through Materialism and Empirio-Criticism is the distinction between materialism and idealism. Broadly speaking, a materialist believes in the objective existence of a world around us, whereas an idealist doesn’t. Lenin argues that anyone agnostic on this divide will inevitably fall into ‘solipsism’: the belief that nothing outside your own mind can be said with certainty to exist. In setting out his thesis Lenin argues against his fellow Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, who had adopted the philosophy of empirio-criticism under the label of ‘empirio-monism’ (monism is the view holding that all of reality is fundamentally unified as a single substance). Lenin argues that Bogdanov’s philosophy is simply idealism disguised in Marxist garb.
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was recently given some publicity by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his book Heligoland, published in 2020. In this book Rovelli looks at past philosophical ideas that might help inform debates on the strange nature of quantum physics and concludes that Lenin’s attack on empirio-criticism was misplaced, accusing Lenin of philosophical dogmatism. However Lenin was far from dogmatic when it came to scientific theory, arguing at length that scientific theory can and should change as new evidence emerges. He was writing at a time when new experimental evidence was challenging accepted theories and was well aware of contemporary scientific developments that were taking place.
Lenin recognized that previously accepted models of science would prove to be correct only within certain limits. The canonical example of this is Newtonian mechanics, which only gives an accurate picture of he world around us at certain scales; describing the world smaller scales require quantum mechanics, whereas describing the world at larger scales requires general relativity. Neither of these theories had been conceived by the time Lenin wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, although they would be developed not long after. However a new finding that Lenin would have been aware of was the discovery of particles we now call electrons, as well as the discovery that the mass of these particles depends on their velocity.
Lenin was clear that the fact that these new particles were apparently mass-less does not in any way undermine materialism. Rather, he stressed that new theories questioning the existence of matter simply represented another step towards understanding the nature of objective reality. It is the existence of this objective reality that materialists insist upon, not any particular description of it. In Heligoland, Rovelli argues that the distinction between materialism and idealism is irrelevant. But there are many millions – perhaps billions – who adhere to an idealist worldview. The world’s major religions all teach that reality is fundamentally spiritual rather than physical. Although religions are not strictly idealist in the philosophical sense, they share deep metaphysical overlaps with idealism.
The debate between the Bolsheviks Lenin and Bogdanov on empirio-criticism has similarities with the debate between the physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohr was content with abstract mathematical descriptions; Einstein felt these were incomplete. There is still significant debate around this interpretation today. Heligoland was in part written to publicise Rovelli’s own interpretation which he calls ‘Relational Quantum Mechanics’, which says that physical properties exist only as a relationship between the observer and the system, rather than as objective facts. It is open to debate whether this constitutes a form of idealism. I will leave discussing this for a future blog post.
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